Make Your Website Work for You – NYC Event April 28th

On Tuesday, April 28th the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce Digital Media & Technology Committee will present “Make Your Website Work for You” from 8:00 to 10:00am at Samsung Experience at the Time Warner Center.
Expert panelists will give tips on how to maximize and get the most out of your website, including:

Free web analytics tools and how to use them

Free tools to insert video, photos and audio onto your site

What your website needs to have to for 2009!

Pattie Stone of pattiedesign, Chairman of MCC Digital Media & Technology Committee, will introduce the panel, moderated by Philip Kent Kiracofe, Chief Technologist, Coldwell Banker Previews International.
Panelists include Paul Burani, Clicksharp Marketing; Melanie Gass, CenterPoint Solution, LLC; and Court Cunningham, Yodle.Register here – MCC Members $10 / Non MCC Members $20
If you’ll be in NYC you won’t want to miss this informative event.
The following article is by Paul Burani of Clicksharp Marketing, who will be sharing his expertise on web analytics tools at Tuesday’s event.
Overheard in the marketing department: “It’s good to be the king.”What if marketing could become as refined a science as dentistry?

You go to the dentist with a cavity, and unless you’re dealing with an underqualified individual, your chances of having the cavity fixed are at or near 100%.
So what if marketing were the same way? You approach your marketing staff with a wish list:

“I need 80% brand recognition from this demographic.”

“I need the cost of new customer acquisition cut in half.”

“I need this new product to sell 5 million units next quarter.”

And what if, by merely budgeting the recommended amount, you could be 100% certain (or close to it) that your goal would be met?
If it sounds too good to be true, think again. A year ago, Google CEO Eric Schmidt publicly announced his vision for the principles of marketing, which, built around “storytelling, entertainment, targeting and selling, will be augmented by analytical tools.”
Is that really so profound? If you take this comment in the context of Google’s progress in its mission of organizing the world’s information, the answer is an obvious YES.
What are some of the culprits of marketing inefficiency in today’s world?
To name a few:

We don’t always know exactly how consumers react to our messages

We can’t always tell if our products’ prices are harmonized with the simple economics of supply and demand

We often leave competitive marketing and product development to guesswork

We still tolerate ambiguity with the return on investment (ROI) generated by our various marketing initiatives.

But with the aforementioned evolution toward a digitized, numbers-driven discipline of marketing, resolving these pitfalls is not so far-fetched. We’re rapidly developing rich feedback loops to help marketers better understand consumer reactions. Price transparency has even reached the advertising marketplace. We can see a lot more about what our competition is doing. And it’s all becoming more measurable.
This points to a brave new world of marketing, in which its goal is no longer to provide the sales force with the means to close the deal. In fact, according to Schmidt:“Eventually, maybe what we can do is guarantee advertisers who pay us money-and this is my fantasy, the sale. If we can get to that level of that specificity, advertising will no longer be a marketing expense. It becomes a sales expense.”
This begs the question: where will marketers turn their attention? Research & development? Operations? Corporate strategy? Wherever the future lies, we all can relate to Mel Brooks in History of the World: “It’s good to the king.”